


Play by numbers

by Oxygen



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Comfort, Dreams, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Musicians
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-05-28 18:31:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15055199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oxygen/pseuds/Oxygen
Summary: “Life’s weird.” Mako begins. ”Lots of things don’t make sense. Saw an old biking mate eat shit on a road we’d gone across hundreds of times before, but we didn’t dwell on that. Just worked through rehab and bought him a round of drinks the day he got his last cast off.“S’the same here."Mako crosses paths with the envoy to Fate during the most liminal, painful months of his life. He's less of a cryptic oracle or omnipotent, interdimensional being, though, and more like a lost spirit that wants to join in on his Dungeons and Dragons campaign.





	1. Horizon

Mako nearly slips stepping out of the fountain, not so much because it’s wet and covered in a thin film of algae or some other growth, but more because he's drunk.

He’s a good drunk. He’s had a decent amount of time to figure out how many beers equals a good time, but that doesn’t make him immune to the wobbling he or anyone else would get.

Someone tries to help him out, but it’s more like the sentiment was there, and somewhere along the way a flapping seal with a custom Dungeons and Dragons tshirt possessed them. But it’s fine. He thanks-- Jonnie. Auburn hair.

“And SO!” She announces. “The brave Hogfolk Paladin Roadhog seals the fountain vessel despite-- despite much struggle on his part, which we have made… as immersive as possible, with the inclusion of a real fountain. Quick, write the curse down. We’re going to forget he’s been cursed by the fountain.”

He sees someone with a black, knitted scarf write something down on a clipboard. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows it’s going to look like a doctor’s signature for a prescription in the morning.

“Wait, what’s the curse again?”

“Foresight, at the price of a-- hold on, let me read the entry.” Handling a phone in her state should be illegal, because it’s raising his blood pressure significantly. Phones are slippery. Drunk seal hands are untrustworthy. Jonnie succeeds anyway.

”Ok, so, foresight at the price of a nagging, ancient vessel spirit gnawing away at his lungs, which… decreases constitution by how ever much the DM sees fit. Jeez, that’s wordy. Anyway, it’s like Mako in real life. Asthma but it’s an ancient curse instead.”

“Uh, ok.”

That’s the sound of someone who’s not gonna copy something down.

 

Mako wrings his long, silvery hair out as everyone mills around, talking about the confusing layout of the session or some other gripes they had with the way it went. In the spur of the moment, he decides to splash Jonnie in the face.

“Hey!” Jonnie stumbles back.

“You get temporary premonition. And mild headaches,” Mako says, or mutters, or something in between that doesn’t quite reach his own ears right. Maybe he misjudged the number of beers he had. Jonnie looks very grave all of a sudden, or as grave as a drunkard can get.

“Course I’m going to get a mild headache, that water’s cold!”

“Ok, ok, we’re done here then,” Mako gets in quickly. Reflex from watching too many ridiculous barfights brew in his time. “Got a composition final tomorrow. You guys can keep on playing inside if you want, just say Roadhog passed out or something.”

They walk, or more accurately _swagger_ , around while Mako trudges onward like a wet mop. The session looks pretty done by now, with everyone quietly soaking in the orange, red, yellow? The lamps of indeterminate color, with gnats and pollen and dust illuminated underneath them. The concrete is an off gray and they watch that too, with the irregular cracks and fancy manhole covers being a real threat to them now.

The carefully manicured shrubs and lawns and cars watch them in turn.

“How’d you come up with this, anyway?” Mako asks Jonnie. It’s the most strange adventure their noble dungeon master’s taken them on.

“Nmhm. Read something somewhere.”

Uh.

“Like...” Mako encourages.

“Like, a PDF.”

Ok, nevermind.

They make it to Mako’s suite in one piece. Mako peels off his wet clothing in the bathroom while everyone else wishes eachother good luck and good night as they head back to their respective rooms.

Mako catches Jonnie leaving.

“Hey, good night.”

“Yeah,” Jonnie says absently, then stops. Turns around. “Good luck on the final. You got this.”

“Thanks. I’ll, uh, see you around.”

 

Lights off.

 

Mako makes it into bed, dry and warm but a bit lonely without his roomate. Probably pulling an allnighter over at a friend’s place, not because of an impending deadline, but just because he’s industrious like that.

The sheets are black and red and white, with curving ferns. He made it during the partnership with the animation students, he recalls. They have a textile concentration in the art school by their school, so he just had to make a pattern. The animator he was making a score for could then pass it along to a friend.

He traces the ferns, traces them, traces the ridges of the textile as he shuts his eyes, traces them again, and again, and again, until he drifts off and begins tracing an urn, or some other smooth vessel.

 

The vessel is covered in flesh.

 

Mako staggers back, eyes wide open. It’s dark, but the figure before him is bright as day, gaunt, slicing through the night in some impossible way. He rushes to cover his eyes, shuts them in a desperate effort to avoid the figure, but it’s of no use. The thing remains before him, somehow.

It’s an unnaturally even shade of white, with a vase bulging from its stomach. The spout juts out from the side painfully, skin taut around it as if it could puncture through at any moment. Its right limbs are missing, and it’s standing still and upright, as if it doesn’t notice him.

Mako feels himself blink. The figure’s face changes, and changes, and changes again-- A pale horse with soft, eerie, gummy skin first, then a strange skull like those from a CAT scan, then a human with bulging eyes, then something else and some other thing that keeps on morphing in front of him like a living ink blot test, ever changing, ever evolving, ever horrifying.

The figure jolts as if it just woke up, and loses its balance. He hears the vessel inside it shatter, and around him, the darkness... shakes. Bright, white cracks form around what feels like, what looks like, a dome around him.

The dome crumbles down around him, but there’s no remains, he just sees into the blank horizon now. A naked figure begins to make its way towards him with a bit of a limp. Normally, he would be horrified, but it just seems to be a human. A naked human, with a white pegleg and a white prosthetic arm and an unpinnable face that his mind can’t hang onto when he truly blinks, but it’s human at least.

 

“Hi! Sorry.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...What?

 

“Bad introduction. Can’t blame me for that one though, you did catch me by surprise. I mean, I came here expecting you but you also did shock me. Nevertheless, you being my houseguest and I being your host, I roll to start off on a better foot. Good thing the phrase specifies one foot, because I only have one of them.”

Roll? What?

“Wait, you’re Mako, right? Old guy who goes to music school and plays that dungeons and dragons game, the one you roll dice in. Unless I’ve got the wrong guy, in which case this would be extremely--”

“That’s me.” It hits him that this is a dream, but he can’t wake up. The white, gangly, fallen figure is spewing water from its amorphous mouth. Water falls from somewhere in the sky, a sky with no stars or clouds or even air, just a white expanse.

The naked human looks up. “Ah, yeah. Can I be honest with you? You’re going into anaphylactic shock, but you’re going to be ok. You’re a lucky guy, Mako, it has a slow onset, relatively speaking that is. Your friend’s arriving right now, you know, the other guy from the room.

“He’s calling the campus medics because you’re wheezing loudly and making it very clear that something is wrong by shaking your head and pointing at your throat and mouth and the empty inhaler in your hands. I can wake you up right now if you want, but--”

“Are you doing this to me?”

“Jeez! You sure like to interrupt, don’t you? And, not me. The vase is. It’s complicated. Sorry. I can explain later if you want.”

Later sounds good. A vase is hurting him. A naked human is talking to him in a dream he can’t escape from. He’s choking to death. But apparently, he’s “going to be ok.”

For now he isn’t, though. So, later it is.

Mako looks up. No difference between the horizon and the sky besides the lines the waterfalls cast. His throat tightens into a hot knot.

“Ahh, mate, sorry. I can… summon a bed for you? Maybe change the decor.”

It turns warm, then a shade of motion that… he doesn’t see, just feels. It’s familiar. Something he was practicing on the bass earlier.

Muscle memory.

“Y’play music, Mako?”

“Yeah. Double bass and a bit of guitar. How’d you know?”

“Just... ” the human seems to choose his words wisely. “A feeling. I play the piano myself.”

“Ah.”

It’s quiet, quiet to his ears but not his hands. The warm hue of the world is less harsh on his eyes than the blinding white from before. He’s grateful for this stranger’s intuition.

He looks back at the human. He has clothing now, and a determinate face. Long overall, with a pointy nose and small eyes adorned by crow’s feet. A smattering of brows too, that seems to have been rubbed or picked off. Salt and pepper stubble, a pointy mop of gray hair, two metal dots by his temples, and simple black turtleneck with dress pants. The outfit has a similar vibe to the one Mako had worn for his audition.

“Hey. That you?” Mako asks.

“Yep, last I remember myself.” The human sees Mako’s eyes wander over to the figure with the shattered vessel inside of it, and rushes to explain.

“I mean, that’s me too! But it’s not me. Just how your brain initially cooked everything up. One foot’s still remembering the day and whatever else it likes to remembers, and then the other foot’s in here. You trip and your brain makes you see that. You know how dreams are.”

Uh.

Hmm.

He supposes.

“You talk a lot for a...” Mako furrows his eyebrows and vaguely motions at...

“For a human, yeah. I’m Jamison. Envoy to a strange vase that floats down the river of fate. Occasionally, this vase bumps hard enough on a metaphorical rock to chip itself, and then that chip gets lodged in someone’s chest, or maybe their leg, or arm, or hell, why not all three! Or just the last two. That’s what happened to me. The last two envoys quit and are happily doing whatever people with magic vase shrapnel in their bodies do, so you’re stuck with me.”

Guess later means now.

“Why didn’t you leave?” There’s a lot of questions on his mind, but that’s the last thing Jamison mentioned, so he’ll start there.

“I’m dead. Mostly. Basically. Essentially. It’s either head to the afterlife and kick it with a bunch of stuffy old souls, or help whoever gets pierced in the chest with the vase while they recover. And as an added bonus, I get to see the world through them. Get to enjoy life again in a strange new way. Unless they don’t want me to, in which case I kindly close my eyes and put my hands over my ears. Or leave.”

Huh.

Mako lays down, defeated. Absently, he realizes he’s been sitting on his bed this whole time. The ferns on the covers begin to grow.

“You, uh. You able to make me sleep?”

A brief pang of sadness flashes by Jamison’s eyes, but it’s gone as fast as he can catch it.

“Yeah. I can wake you up when you’re a bit stronger.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s probably weird. One big biker with a deep voice-- maybe deeper than his standing bass-- in a hospital room surrounded by nerds, young and old. Mostly young. All musicians of some caliber.

But it’s fine. He likes it that way. This is his ragtag family, full of anarchists or part time writers or fantasy enthusiasts with a fascination for how an orchestra can meld together, or how resting a hand on the strings near the bridge of an electric guitar can make all of the difference.

His ragtag family can’t be there all of the time for him, and he’s fine with that too. He needs space to catch his breath right now. His fingers are numb, nothing moves quite right, and he gets a lot of pain in his right side. Doctors say he stopped breathing for a good while, some kind of spontaneous allergic reaction not related to his asthma, and there’s some temporary brain damage. Makes moving and understanding pain or touch harder, since the relevant regions were the ones most deprived of oxygen.

He made a lot of headway in his first week, though, so they have great hopes for the rest of his recovery.

His wallet’s not as happy. He’s dug up his savings covering the hospital visit. He already reaches out for more, namely into the savings he started for the fall semester. At this rate, he’s probably going to have to take a gap year.

That means he’s got to search for a job outside of the school, and housing, and deal with his numb fingers and poor grip and phantom pain and it all piles up on him at that moment, until he feels like he’s choking on earth in a grave of his own making.

He almost wishes Jamison had woke him up later, or never.

But maybe he really is the envoy to a strange jar floating down the river of fate. Maybe this was the time.

That’s what he likes to tell himself when he takes his first steps down the hall. Or when he breathes into a tube with small ping pong balls inside of it, and the doctors tell him they’re astounded with his progress.

Jonnie sits by his bed. She tells him about how when he first woke up, he called her Seal Hands. _Where’d that come from?_ She had asked, and he had answered something he can’t remember. He can remember that it made her laugh.

Jonnie is a good friend. She’s from Sydney, and believes in the good in humans and also maybe aliens. He could tell her about his dream, or encounter, or whatever it was, but maybe he can’t. He trusts her, but it also feels personal. Private. Can’t word this without his tongue going numb.

He hasn’t seen or heard Jamison since he woke up, but he doesn’t exactly miss him either. It feels like he’s there in the same way he felt shades of motion in the dream. An inexplicable presence. But just because he doesn’t miss him _doesn’t_ mean he’s fine with sitting on some pretty big questions, and some other small ones that are more a part of his whole nagging curiosity about…

Well, _everything_.

Yet, Jamison stays hidden behind the curtains.

Jonnie tells him he can move in with her. She can try to get him a job at her place, an old club that could use an extra pair of hands cleaning during after hours. She’ll put in a good word for him, and twist a few arms if it comes to that.

 

Time passes.

 

Mako leaves the hospital. Absently looks behind him as Jonnie drives him to her place.

The glint of the summer sky, the lazy, viscous air floating atop hot cement, and the manicured flower gardens of the hospital parking lot are the last true feelings of warmth and hope he’ll feel in a long time.

 

And in the back of his head he hears,

I want to go home, but I hate it there too.

I want to, I want to,

I want to.

 

He dreams more than he ever has, but it’s all broken, mushy, utter garbage. He falls asleep in the middle of conversations. He sleeps bits at a time in the morning. He never truly rests, even after sleeping for hours.

He wakes up parched and overheated, not sweaty, just smoldering like embers would.

He hears things when he goes to sleep, or sees everything behind a gray, opaque curtain, short scenes and blue rooms, gray rooms, hallways, houses with ghosts sweeping through them and picking living souls away like leaves in a hurricane as they run to whatever level in the house could be safe from this inexplicable threat.

Sometimes there’s rooms with beasts who explode into a murderous flurry and exterminators in yellow-orange suits come in and make the residents move a unit over as they carry in dangerous looking megaphones. Classical music is, for some inexplicable reason, the only protection the residents have from the shockwaves that leak out from the building.

The residents hug the walls furthest from the unit filled with exterminators. Someone never puts their headphones on fast enough, but he doesn’t see them die either.

 

Jonnie’s flat is gray, grayer than before. The egg poacher makes disgusting, bland, foul eggs he can never salt right, but maybe he’s going to get the hang of it. His fingers are getting better, but it’s not fast enough. His body feels leaden. His lungs wouldn’t let him play a standing bass yet, never mind get a job, but “it’s on the horizon,” the doctors promise him.

The keyboard Jonnie lent him is, frankly, infuriating to play, and he can never sit right while he plays it. The position makes hot iron bands clamp around his chest, and his fingers and wrists ache. But that’s how it always is, isn’t it? Growing pains with a new instrument aren’t unusual.

The road he wants to take home for his songs never ends. The house of closure is always on a hill where everything else in his life is: On the horizon. Like everything else, it’s on the fucking horizon, and the sun is falling.

 

His tongue feels too heavy in his mouth. Jamie’s presence is monstrous now, he’s sure of it, and he’s sure he’s going crazy.

 

In the middle of one of these distant scenes or memories or dreams with the rooms and storms and beasts and exterminators, he grips hard enough on the gray curtains, fists going red and white as he fights through the viscosity of dreams, and rips them open. He’s finally pierced through the threshold.

He can’t move much further, but he can hear rain and feel gusts of wind and pellets of water and loose ragged curtain edges battering against his skin.

“Jamison!” He growls, he yells, he cries, all as last resort. Lightning flashes through the sky, and he can see a beast huddles underneath a tree with branches bending and lashing around like whips in the wind. The creature is crying, amorphous, gangly, white. Curling into itself.

_I’ll be there soon, I promise._

  
  
  
  
  
  


It starts with small successes, which seem like small successes until he realizes they’re big successes and it fills him with a pinpoint of hope. The sun is falling below the horizon, but it’s autumn, and the sunset and the trees and the last few cicadas are beautiful.

He can breath in deeper. He can grab door knobs without missing or having to paw around to grab them. He can make the walk to Jonnie’s workplace and back for once, and only feel reasonably tired. He can pick up a bill he finds on the floor without scratching his nails too much against the rough cement and quitting out of frustration. He uses the bill to buy a soda and a scratch ticket at the corner store. He wins on the scratch ticket, and redeems it immediately. Pockets the cash though. It’s going into savings.

There’s more of whatever that is, too. He slips on his way back home, but falls into an old leather couch someone had just put outside for the garbage trucks to haul away. The owner turns around as she’s about to walk inside and comments on his luck.

Then there’s his interview with the club owner, where his reflexes help him catch a stray bottle of Jack Daniels that nearly clocked the owner on the head. The man, a rather friendly guy with a soft waist, had bumped into the display and toppled a few things over. Impressed, he tells Mako if it wasn’t for his quick actions, he’d have no club to hire him on the spot.

There’s endless little things, endless big things, things of indeterminate size and value but all of a strange, lucky, eerie nature like this. They keep on happening until they get too strange and Mako finds himself glancing at cracker boxes with cash prize promises at the store. Beyond reason, he knows that if he goes home that day, he can enter the sweepstakes and win something. Maybe even something big.

That’s enough.

Jamie’s presence isn’t monstrous anymore. In fact, it’s lacking.

But he’d have to attribute all of this to him, the man behind the curtains pulling all of the strings. Unless he’s going crazy and every little action he takes, or every accident that happens to him, speaks volumes to him and makes him feel like he’s on top of the world.

Or even worse. Everything feels premeditated.

Finding a bill on the floor is usual. Feeling like you can divine the outcomes of a shitty sweepstakes, or the lottery, or the best steps to take through a jewelry store is something else. It terrifies him, no matter how much he needs the cash.

Maybe he’s overthinking this. Maybe his cognition just hasn’t recovered like his hands or his lungs.

He feels his chest go cold.

He get back to Jonnie’s place after his first night of work, and he hopes to God or fate or whoever else is watching over him that he’ll see Jamison in his dreams that night.

And he does.

 

“I’m sorry!” Jamison yells. He’s still a bit amorphous and bizarre, but he’s almost the graying old man he was before. No time to worry about formalities.  

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I was trying to make it up to you but that wasn’t right. I’m sorry.”

“I need to feel like I’m my own person,” Mako says, voice breathy. “I need to feel like the world is real, Jamison.”

“We’ll set ground rules. Want to go first?” Jamison asks.

“Mm.”

There’s a small pause as Mako collects his thought. Jamison jitters.

“Nothing out of the ordinary, unless...” Mako thinks of the best definition. 

“... unless it’s organic. Let’s… start with music. Bouncing ideas off of eachother is organic. Making me play Liszt isn’t.”

A short pause.

”...don’t... want to go through life playing by numbers. Don’t want to be a puppet while someone else knows the inner workings of everything around me.”

“Mhm,” Jamison nods, serious. He’s honed in on him with his wide eyes like the rest of the world never even existed.

“And... ” Hmm. Mako sighs. Ugh.

“Let’s check in with each other more often.”

Maybe not a request he should make to a head-dwelling spirit for his own sake, but he can’t deny something feels important about their paths crossing.

He feels like he can justify it.

Maybe.

“I can do that,” Jamison nods. “Should probably have been doing that.”

Mako breaths an internal sigh of relief.

“Where were you?” Mako asks. Jamison rubs the back of his neck.

“Sorry a--”

“Don’t need to apologize.” He says, voice rumbling. Jamison fiddles with his long, gummy fingers, not quite convinced.

 

“Do you know the story of the golden thread?” Jamison says suddenly.

Mako shakes his head.

“So, it goes like this. A young boy-- usually some dickhead 7 year old from an ambiguously European country-- finds a witch in a forest. She gives him a spindle of golden thread that can speed him through life if he unravels it. And because he’s a dickhead 7 year old, he unspools it pretty quickly to look at all of the girlfriends he gets when he’s a teenager. He get bored of that, though, so he fast forwards to having a wife and owning a successful business and a big home and everything.

“Pretty soon, he realizes he’s getting very old and everyone around him is very dead, so he completely regrets being a dickhead 7 year old. The witch, seeing that she's succeeded in teaching him how to enjoy _the little things in life_ , gives him one final wish. He uses it to go back to the day they met.”

Mako raises an eyebrow. He can see parallels, but he’s not getting it entirely.

“Good story, hmm? The vase must have read one of the versions. I like to think it was mine. Anyway, it’s in the rules that you can’t fast forward through life. So lazy people don’t avoid swimming through the river of fate, or something of that sort.

“But since I’m the envoy, I’m the gatekeeper to that strange power amongst other strange powers. If it gets used, I’m the one who get punished for it. Mostly. I have to swim upstream, which entails a few things, most of them being unpleasant, and find whoever I’m guiding again. It makes me emotional and reckless and angry in the process and--” Jamison breathes in.

”-- and the person I’m supposed to be a tour guide for gets emotional and reckless and angry by osmosis, since I’m sort of in your head, in the same way that you’re in mine. That explains the last few weeks from what I could feel from you.”

Mako’s taken aback. It’s… a lot. He’s not sure how to feel about… well, any of this.

He wants to believe it’s real, if only to have some explanation for everything. It’s a good explanation, or at the very least entertaining. Maybe this is how myths are made.

 

He does his best to take it all in stride.

 

“...Why’d... you use it, then?” Mako ventures after a long pause.

“I--” Jamison opens his mouth. He closes it pretty soon, frustrated at himself. When he opens it again, he launches into whatever’s on his mind at full speed.

“You can’t sleep in your dreams, and being in there for too long becomes a living hell. This place wasn’t meant for living souls to stay in it forever. But, you’re in pain if I wake you up! And it’s a lot of pain and terror that I thought was beyond necessary, to hell what the vase thinks about life!

“And now that you’re stuck with me for the rest of your life, or however long it is until you dismiss me, I didn’t want that to be the first impression you had of me, because I know first impressions count. Oh, and you play an instrument too! You’re one of the first people I’ve guided who’s a musician. I know that sounds stupid, but in reality, it--” he gulps.

“Ok. I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t fucking know! I’m-- for once, I don't have answers. Maybe, just _maybe_ , I thought it’d be an easy swim back since we had just met.”

 

Jamison seems to rub his temples, but it’s not a gentle thing, more like he’s violently grinding peppercorns with a mortar and pestle.

“I’m not perfect. The vase isn’t perfect either. The vase has got to be some stupid alien supercomputer that learned what the human experience is from playing videogames and reading Greek myths. Which as you can tell doesn’t translate super well for regular humans like us who’ll never positively affect humanity or learn a veeeeery important life lesson by having our livers picked by birds for all of eternity. Or a few weeks in your case.”

Jamison’s furrowing his thin, almost non existent brows now, more frustrated and choked up than before. But he seems to be working towards winding himself down.

”The vase brings people together, but it can also make them suffer for reasons I gave up trying to understanding a long, long time ago. I’m just doing my best to make the ride as smooth as possible, and sometimes I fuck up. I know you told me not to apologize, but from the bottom of my ambiguously existing ghost heart, _I’m sorry._ ”

 

Mako rests an hand on Jamison’s shoulder. He’s surprised it doesn’t go through him or anything.

 

“Life’s weird.” He begins. ”Lots of things don’t make sense. Saw an old biking mate eat shit on a road we’d gone across hundreds of times before, but we didn’t dwell on that. Just worked through rehab and bought him a round of drinks the day he got his last cast off.

“S’the same here. All that matters to me is that you’re sticking with it.”

 

That's a year of playing back the sound of rubber and leather and flesh on a road, of metal wrapping around a pole. A year of yellowing bandages and catheters and wounds to staples to scar tissues he helped clean. Late nights at the ICU. Late days at his old job. Sick, foul breath from coffee and being too exhausted to brush his teeth but too on edge to go to sleep.

But it’s a year that changed him, and maybe he can understand the vase now.

 

Jamison lets go of a breath he’s been holding for god knows how long, and it’s all good.

 

Mako looks around. He hadn’t thought of the surroundings until now, but it’s just the same white void from before.

“...Any chance we can talk outside of here?” He asks.

“Oh, yeah!” Jamison pipes up. His voice is still a little rough, but he’s glad to have something more... hopeful to discuss.

“I can talk to you, and you can think back, but I reckoned it’d be shocking if I just did it out of the blue. 'Specially since we hadn’t talked in a while.”

“Yeah, it would have been,” Mako huffs. “Maybe we can keep the talking here for now.”

Hmm.

“Can you do other things? Maybe, move things around?”

“Oh, yeah,” Jamison answers. “Tell you what. As proof of our partnership, I could, to start… fill the coffee machine this morning, and neaten up the supply closet at your work before you get there. Anyone could have done it, hell, you could have filled the coffee machine in your sleep. But it’s proof you’ll see me again. That’s all I’ll do, I promise.”

 

Huh. Neat.

Mako likes it.

“Thanks. I’ll keep an eye out.”

“Don’t mention it.” Jamison suddenly looks at his wrist like he’s checking how much time they have left, but he's got no wristwatch on. He cackles, and it echoes across the void.

“Love doing that! Sorry. Gets everyone the first time.”

Mako dares to crack a smile. Jamison grins back. It’s a little snaggletoothed and not truly human yet, but it’s getting there, and that’s what counts.

 

“See you around,” Mako mumbles as he wakes up.

  


 

 

 


	2. Sinkhole

Mako hears a terrible exhale, or some rush of wind and change of pressure in his ears as he wakes up. He inhales, and exhales. Rubs his eyes.

He’s in his room, which was an empty guest room before that, and an ex’s room before even that. He traces the pinholes in the walls with his eyes. Tries to imagines posters.

Jonnie’s gray keyboard sleeps in the corner.

It’s been a week since Jamison came back. True to his word, Mako wakes up to a cup of coffee every day, and a clean closet at work. The twitchy bastard makes a guest appearance in his dreams every night, pulling his leg with watchless wrists or clothes with no back sides to them or a box with smaller boxes in it until the smallest box is not a box but a rather small clown.

Jamison asks him if there’s anything he wants to touch base on. When Mako comes up short, the ghost tells him he’ll be there day, wherever  _there_ is, and whisks him back to reality.

Despite himself, and despite it all, Mako smiles.

It’s been a long time since anyone’s bothered to mess with him like that.

He wonders if Jamison can roam the world, playing old pianos in long-forgotten basements, or if Jamison can talk to anyone else. If he can do what he does for Mako, surely he can do what he wants for himself? Surely, it’s the answer he’d like to hear, and not whatever other ones there might be.

And surely Jamie can hear him, or at least he’d guess that, so Mako resolves to go to his favorite cafe bookstore before his graveyard shift. Snoop around the books, ruffle up the disc collection, steal some wifi, and take a head dwelling spirit out for coffee and a good sandwich  _whether or not_ Jamie’s raided every good venue in the city already.

The radio by his bedside babbles on about observatories and arrays and alumni from the local technology school going off to do great things in the middle of the desert. It doesn’t mean much to him, but he’s never turned down hearing curious news.

A nice way to start the morning. Beats the driving, droning, default ringtone that doubles as an alarm clock.

Jonnie peeks in to say goodbye.  _Going to the intramural Dungeons and Dragons meet_ , she says. He can see her wearing the custom tshirt from the night at the fountain, framed by her slowly graying hair.

He’s got to remember to join in on this semester’s campaign, gap year be be damned. He can make the excuse that his party won’t make it to the next tavern without Roadhog’s stern reminders to eat breakfast, and also maybe his godgiven magic. But first, he’s got to get coffee.

 

 

The cafe bookstore is a short walk from Jonnie’s place. It’s a medium sized joint carved into the corner of a city block, which would make parking an absolute hassle if he hadn’t been avoiding heavy machinery altogether for the last few months.

When he first came to the city, there was a wedding dress store there, and after that it was a videogame lounge, then after that it was something else he can’t quite remember.

Now it’s the bookstore cafe.

He expects the place to go by much like its predecessors, so he cherishes the moments he can have there. It’s a warm, wooden place, with a mellow green patchwork of rugs spanning the floor. The assorted bookstands are filled with assorted books, and covered in assorted nicks and scratches and miscolorations and every other charming mark of age he can care to describe.

A neat rack of CDs and vinyls and audiobooks lie at the end opposite to the cafe and the doors. It’s cloaked by the small, interceding forest of bookstands as if it were a secret pirate’s cove, waiting to be discovered by more adventurous patrons.

The metal racks are covered in old stickers, some half peeled off and illegible, others living on with their bizarre signatures and logos--  _Bonus, 21 Fox, Aggro, Playtime at the Windsor,_  so on and so forth-- their meanings lost to the ages.

He doesn’t think the other businesses were heartless, unloved ventures, but it matters to him that this one exists the way it does.

It reminds him of the bars he’d pop into when crossing the country on his bike. The big city ones could either be too cold and empty, or far too polished with expensive customers smoking expensive cigarettes in the designated, or undesignated, smoking areas.

The smaller ones he’d walk into during his escapades felt consistently and wonderfully unique. They-- the places, as if they were people-- had taken over the venues like a group of reject interior designers who’d raided a garage sale. With function taking precedence over style, they furnished the space in their own idiosyncratic, slightly uncoordinated, entirely personal ways.

He remembers seeing gray LCDs hoisted up on the wall, too small to really watch the game on, but good enough speakers to hear the plays. Neon OPEN sign which he knew to have been the old convenience store’s sign, but was now the bar’s.

Worn, wine colored leather stools patched up with vinyl scraps and fabric paint.

Stained, wooden stages with equipment from retired sound engineer friends that he could get on and play something for open mic night.

He frowns.

Something always bugged him about dwelling on and on about all of this. A long time ago, he would have been riding his bike down an interstate in an unnamed country, and it wouldn’t have bothered him that he would die alone with his memories.

But now he’s old, nostalgic, silly, and going up to the counter of the cafe to read the items off and buy himself some time from who knows what, the cashier or himself?

 

 

 _Pick something_ , Mako ventures, with meaning.

_…Huh?_

Jamison’s there. The voice feels too even and too loud to be real, but maybe that’s good. Keeps everything beyond  _here_ neatly distinguished. He forges on.

_What do you want?_

_...How’d that w-- wait, nevermind. Dumb question. Get what you like, just add a flat white to it._

That he does. He doubles up on the grilled cheese, just gets one tomato soup, and tails a flat white at the end. Fancy place, fancy man. He never bothered to check the coffee section in much depth before.

_You been here before?_

_...Nah. I heard you wanted to go to this place. Didn’t want to spoil the surprise for myself._

Hmm.

Hm.

 

_Can you read my mind?_

_...Sorta, not really. Only what you want me to hear, and then some. It’s why I only came around when you got real upset at the grocery store. S’gotta be forward, you know._

 

Ah.

 

There’s a bit of radio silence while his order is completed and he takes a seat, but that’s fine by him.

Mako could ask Jamison about how he exists in the world, what he does in his spare time, or any other probing questions he’s not sure he wants answered. Some feel safer than others, better for a chat over coffee, so he follows those instead.

_You said you play piano, right?_

He takes a sip of his coffee. Ach, still hot. He scowls at the little paper cup.

_...Yeah! Pretty much._

_Pretty much?_

_...My parents were really onboard with music. Let me try all sorts of things. My father composed for everything from the harpsicord to the violin to even the horns at the parades for the local Lord. Nothing he couldn’t play, but he liked the organ heaps. My mother was partial to the piano, but she too had it in her for anything she put her mind to._

_… I grew up with, mmm… more instruments than I could count. Mostly because the number kept changing. But if I put some thought into it I reckon I could come up with an estimate. Hadta be, lets say, around 27 at some point? Mostly small percussion things, some invented stuff._

 

 _Sorry-- The local Lord?_ Mako didn’t really get an answer to his question, so he latches on to the next weirdest thing.

_...Ah, yeah. It’s… complicated. A town called Adlersbrunn, in... think of Germany, but you can’t find this country on the map._

_You sound Australian._

_...Hehe, well! I’ve been out of Adlersbrunn for a while. But enough about me! I have ta ask, Mako-- Why this place?_

_I’m sentimental._

_...Then tell me about your first instrument, you nostalgic old man._

 

He snorts.  _The recorder._

Jamie cackles.

_...Well, then! Tell me about an instrument you’re fond of. Didn’t ya say y’liked the standing bass?_

_Mmm._

 

He takes a bite out of the grilled cheese. It’s lukewarm, but that’s how he likes it.

 

_Good history with it. Primary school had a… music teacher. Had a few old instruments and she let me try out the bass guitar._

_Later on I switched instruments-- not sure why, just wanted to try something new. Chose a half sized standing bass. The rest is history._

 

Or…

He frowns. Debates with himself in a way immeasurable by words, and decides  _fuck it._

 

_Moved to Oz when I turned 20 and drove commercially. Spent whatever was left over on bikes and fixing them up, until that’s all I did. Fixing them, and riding them._

_Wasn’t easy playing it on the road, and I didn’t have too much of a professional drive to anyway. Went back to the bass guitar for simplicity’s sake. Played mostly by myself._

_Wasn’t in a biker gang. More like enthusiasts and roadblazers. We drove around, hitting up bars in the middle of nowhere on the weekends. One thing led to another, and I ended up being a bouncer for some of them. Caught a few eyes. Got better gigs at bigger places in the suburbs and then back in the city._

_Nice pay if you don’t mind the boring shifts, but watching rich kids get into catfights now and then was good._

The yachts, the lofthouses, the pools, lit up in ultramarine or aqua or purple or some other lux on lux scheme, with wandering eyes and crisp button ups. Cold silver rings on hot skin, wandering hands, bordering-on-white knuckled fists by his side.

_Some of the venue owners brought in musicians, and they were the only people who bothered to ask me how my day was, because drunk trust fund kids don’t count. Started playing standing bass with them on the off hours._

_Been a while since I had played it, but it always felt like stepping into a good, worn in pair of shoes._

He looks out into the store, with its shield of  _Oddyseys_  and  _Great Gatsbys_ and  _C# for Dummies_. The street lights and rush hour cars twinkle in his periphery.

_Never really wanted to be a bouncer, but I wasn’t about to start complaining about how lucky I got. Didn’t know what I wanted to do besides pay the bills, ride my bike with the mates, and fuck around with some instruments from time to time._

_Got to do that and more for a long time. Got to save. Started graying prematurely._

_Finally going to college. Not sure if it’s for me, but it’s been good meeting Jonnie and the rest._

 

_Well, that’s me._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of him, anyway.

 

Jamie’s quiet for a bit. Mako wonders if he’s still rattling around, and it has him worried for a second until he reemerges.

_...Nothin’ to say, sorry. It’s good to hear you talk._

Mako bites back a laugh, but it’s not his usual sarcastic snort. Feels more like being 22 again, and having a friend tell him the new bike fits him when he’s not sure he rocks the outfit or even the hairdo yet.

_Thanks. I’m trying to beat a friend of mine at it. His name begins with a J._

Mako feels a light, quick pressure at his shoulder.

_…You’re outmatched, old man! I’ve got a few hundred years on you with this. Might want to get a teacher. Heard there’s a good one looking for pupils, though, his name ends with -amison._

A few hundred years.

It weighs on him, and he can’t put into neat, clean words why. Inside, he watches cages and rabid dogs waiting to be unleashed and moths trapped between the window and the screen, so he does his best to lighten the situation for himself.

_Tell him I’m in. Maybe we could play some stuff together on the side. Got a keyboard with his name on it at home._

_…_

_…_

_…_

_… !!!_

Mako smiles.

The cafe is empty, besides Jamison and the cashier who is also a barista and a chef and a librarian and hopefully not paying too much attention to him, so he grants himself that much.

  
  
  
Work is as slow as ever, and that’s how he likes it. Sweeping and mopping after hours, taking inventory, the tedious, quiet, rare type of activity you can get paid for. The city around them never sleeps, but in the awkward span between the late night bars closing and the early birds heading to work, maybe time does stop.

The boss crunches numbers at a wooden bar he has to call dead, with its beer pipes sleeping and cups upside-down. He’s an old school man too; The joint’s technically not small enough for pencil and paper accounting, but he’s set in his ways and organized enough to do it that way anyway. The paper is that rich, yellow, ruled kind, taken from a peelable stack.

Mako eyes the stage. Hasn’t seen one of those in a minute.

The resin of the boards is just slightly scuffed, but otherwise an unusually nice wood that must have been selected with both care and a thick wallet. A lone microphone, and odd wires all intended for rather specific equipment, stand there. Black, multi-tiered speakers loom around the stage, some smaller ones anchored to the walls.

He narrows his eyes, trying to guess what would go to what. Maybe a singer, with the microphone? An amplifier or two, with their fatty metal heads, for electric guitars? How many would fit on the relatively small stage and leave room for a drummer, though? What about a keyboard? What exactly plays at this venue, anyway?

His curiosity grows. Maybe there’s a flyer around.

Surely enough, there’s a stack on a table close to the stage, ready to be distributed later in the day. Nothing that interests or repulses him particularly, just a singer and a guitarist for some genre he can’t pin down. Maybe just a roomy, conversational, slow kind of rock going by their average day looks and casual sitting poses.

On a second look, they seem familiar. The short sleeve button up, the hazel hair, someone from… around the halls, someone from somewhere else. He can’t place it, but it feels like someone from the school. Something he doesn’t want to admit, like frustration or bitterness that he quickly cloaks in neat, clinical words and safe, surgical compartments, comes knocking at his front door.

The weeks and months have passed, dulling some blade that doesn’t, that shouldn’t, matter to him anymore.

He lives with Jonnie. He talks to a ghost. He makes rent on time again, no loaning and leaning on a kind and understanding friend. He’s going back to the monthly Dungeons and Dragons meetings too, trying anyway. Life is resettling, reshifting, readjusting.

This is nothing new to him, even if he does lose quality sleep more often these days and can’t quite bounce back like in his youth. It’s fine, he tells himself, and the record in his head spins at an unreliable, hurried pace, telling him it’s fine, it’s fine,  **it’s fine** , as it wrestles against the grain of age.

It’s… maybe not fine, but it’ll have to be fine for now, because the bar is dim and quiet and narrows down on his thoughts with its invisible eyes and more tangible walls. He breathes in, six seconds, holds, six seconds, and exhales, six seconds. Breathe, wash, rinse, and repeat. Breathe, wash, rinse, and wring out the mop. Repeat.

Wash, rinse, mop, and repeat, until a tremble in his right arm settles, some other task he forgot beckons him, and a onceover is given to the bar. The boss gives him the A-OK to leave, pivoting his whole torso from out of the hunched over position he fell into. Waves goodbye.

He meets the cold air.

 

The road home is uneventful.

The nights are getting chillier, admittedly, but the walk is short enough. This isn’t a smaller town, so the nights never get to that liquid black he was so used to years ago. Rather, the sky and the air are some deep, off, red-yellow or green, sometimes even blue, like a backlit screen.

The defunct car shop he passes is almost inviting, almost homely in a post-apocalyptic sort of way. It’s settled far back into a fenced lot, overgrown by miscellaneous vegetation and disuse. Mako’s not really sure which one came first.

The busier streets have their cars once in a while, snaking through the midnight city for whatever quiet, liminal reason, but otherwise they’re so unnaturally empty that he feels like he could play in them, crossing from sidewalk to sidewalk in an imaginary game of chase.

And the servo.

Far down the road, somewhere between work and home, he spots it from across an intersection.

It’s not… any brand he can recognize, maybe the sign is too far away for his failing eyesight and tired mind to catch, but the lights are on in neat rows and there’s no mistaking what it is. Towers of lightpoles, not circular skylights or bars, because there’s no ceiling to cover the pumps. Lined up like beds in a hospital, they wait for cars.

They extend forever.

He thinks he’s tired, or something’s wrong, but the sky is too black and the horizon has no end and the rows hammer and beat and march on like innumerable aisles in the maze of a deadly, watching hyperstore, until they don’t, until the pumps are just a neat number of pumps that he can count on his fingers, and he wonders if anything had ever happened at all.

 

“Just a teaspoon of water,” Jonnie says, measuring out an unreasonably small, smaller than a teaspoon, amount of water. She places it in the microwavable egg poacher.

“I usually make one and stick it between toast. Oh, salt.” She’s still waking up, while Mako gets ready for bed. The coffee pitcher had been filled by their third resident, so Jonnie absently pours herself a cup.

The poacher spins in the microwave, and the lights flicker. The microwave tends to do that-- When it works, the lights flicker at an almost predictable rhythm, like if he were blinking.

“S’an acquired taste,” Mako says impulsively. Jonnie snorts.

“Yeah, I’m waiting to get sick of it like I got sick of noodles. I bought some from the cornerstore yesterday and it felt like eating radiation.”

The flickering ends when he pulls the poacher out. Ach, hot.

Sometimes the eggs stick to the poacher, fried like when it’s overcooked on a pan. It gives him an uncanny feeling, though, when he bites into it and tastes the equivalent of an icecube, no oil, no salt, a poor simile and analogue, so on and so forth.

Jonnie makes eggs more like they’re supposed to be made in the poacher. The whites are thick, consistent, bordering on gummy but not enough to bother him. The salt pokes dimples on the surface, the yolk runs well as he bites into the sandwich, and he can almost pretend that this isn’t the cousin or maybe estranged twin of a depression meal.

 

Jonnie leaves for an 11 am class. Mako retreats to bed, in the gray room with invisible posters and more visible pinholes. The radio sleeps, the gray keyboard sleeps, but his quilt with its red and black and white ferns is ready to come alive.

Red like the tired veins in his eyes, black like the bags underneath, white like the bright white light burning into his eyes from the window as he stands still and focuses on an indeterminate point in the wall.

The walls smooth out to a medium, featureless gray as his eyes wrench themselves still.

That’s what they do, he knows that. He’s spent many long hours in seminar halls and hospitals and bars zoning out. When his eyes jitter, as they eventually do, the world resumes, the colors flush back in, as if shaken like a bottle of glitter and water.

When he moves to the red and black and white bed, the world never resumes.

He eyes the walls furthest away, the windows, his hands. The windows are a bright, blinding white, like the horizon and the sky from  _there,_  the place _beyond,_ wherever  _there_ or  _beyond_ is. The walls are a featureless gray bordering on a plastic or a film, and his hands are, well, his hands. For that he’s grateful.

Plastic. Curtains, hands.

It comes to him like a memory that never made itself at home, and keeps on knocking at the periphery. Curtains, hands, fists, viscosity, tearing. Curtains, tearing, hands, curtains, viscosity, fists, never really reaching home.

Laying a hand flat on the wall, he feels the cold film underneath. He doesn’t feel himself breath anymore, but he does continue to blink, and every unconscious decision becomes conscious as the walls shift underneath his hands like a flag or a wave or a chest rising and falling.

With every blink, the room becomes longer, or he sees the missing posters with their pins filling the empty pinholes, or into some beyond with blue hallways and green mazes and red rooms and white terraces and nothing at all, never quite leaving but also never quite returning to the familiar room.

And like he becomes aware of his eyelids and eyebrows and tongue and teeth, he becomes aware of his tense hands and wary ears and inactive legs and complacent hands and _goes for it,_  leaning in and sinking deep into the wall.

 

See travel times, traffic and nearby places.

 

Mako swings the Pegman around the map, allowing himself some amusement. Good physics.

By Route 83, it’s a two and a half hour ride of red earth and blue sky from Dajarra to Mount Isa. Two and a half hours of seamless blue sky, of reliable white hot sun, of relentless, thirsty red earth and just a whole lot of  _nothing_ that’s become his everything as a long haul driver.

The road isn’t new to him. He’s made the drive from this point to that one so many times, or rides so equivalent that distinguishing them by route or destination doesn’t matter anymore. However, it’s the first time he’s made the drive through his computer.

Who would go and photograph the Outback? Maybe he would-- methodically weaving through the vast desert and sparse cities with a camera up top sounds just like the long haul freight deliveries he’s become tentatively used to. Keep an eye out for the short bridges, avoid as many toll roads as possible, ignore the hitchhikers until his altruistic side gets the best of him, and get recertified every few months.

That’s what he believes it takes, anyway. Can’t find much information on how to get a Google Maps gig, so he resigns himself to what he has for now.

It does feel different, the roads. Something’s off about the light, or maybe it’s the quality of the photographs, but either way it seems artificial and one dimensional.

Maybe he can appreciate Google Street view for what it is, but it doesn’t match that same heavy, concrete quality that driving imprints in his memory-- the kicks from the aging suspension as he passes over potholes and cattle guards, the flashing lights between the branches as he coasts by trees, the roar of cars that changes in tone as they approach him on the other side and then leave, never to be seen again. His computer chugs as he rotates from one cardinal direction of the road to another.

The chugging eventually verges on industrial white noise and silicon gas in the air, so he goes back to the overhead view. 

He’s had his fun, so he goes to close the browser. Before he can get there, Mako spots another little Pegman, wandering the roads independent of him or anyone else. 

He treads at a regular pace, like a silent giant taking his morning walk through the Outback. Mako waves to him, through his Pegman. The other Pegman turns around for just a second before beckoning him over. When Mako makes his way over, the other Pegman bends his knees, and breaks into a sprint.

Shocked, Mako runs behind him. The other Pegman threatens to run over the horizon’s curve, so he does his best to keep up. The earth beneath him gives way to sea and night and then unmapped darkness, but Mako keeps on running.

And running.

And running.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	3. Coffee Cup

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter! Chapter 4 is a fun afterword type of thing.

In an empty music room, as the summer sun hangs high and proud, he watches the teacher show him how to zip up the standing bass.

He’s younger then, younger than when he came to Australia or when he got admitted to the observatory for music. Thankfully, he’s tall for his age and not afraid to look a little silly lumbering around with this beast of an instrument.

The bag is a wefted, heavy kind of plastic like the one his backpack’s made out of. It has some knicks and scars, scrapemarks and ingrained dirt, popped seams hotfixed with an offshade black thread, yet otherwise it’s reliable. The bag is not too padded, so the professor tells him to be careful when setting it down.

Maneuvering it around the cramped room with its mismatched chairs, too many for the meager number of students who bother to attend the class, will be interesting.

Maybe the details were never there; Maybe the bag was pristine to match an impossibly beautiful instrument for such a small school, but he’d never know. Sold the bass through Gumtree after his first few months in Australia, and all of his memories seemed to escape with it. That’s a hellstorm of its own that he leaves at a book title, so he looks back to the empty, empty, mid-day room, bleeding into sunset.

The professor, an older lady with a bandana of an indeterminate, shimmering, green or kaleidoscope pattern around her head, shows him some videos he can practice with. _I won’t be around forever_ , she tells him, and it makes sense. She has cancer, and he knows that in the way he knows his boss had a hip replaced or that, though poor upkeep, the house next door was plummeting in resale price.

He leaves her, off to lug this beast of a instrument home as summer vacation begins. The professor tells him not to bother with stacking up the chairs, to just go and enjoy his December.

He calls himself a standing bass player, but in the way his professor has cancer or his boss had his hip replaced or an endless list of things that mean something to him but don’t really hit _home_.

He walks home in the heat, the suns hanging high and low and somewhere in between, drawing closer to his very own horizon. The great black bag is a magnifying glass, searing the skin of his back.

The professor was enthusiastic. Besides practice videos, one curiously being named a ‘vomit exercise’, she shows the class famous standing bass players. Calls them _the best of the best_ , sits them down to watch ambiguous videos of old guys on stages that don’t really stick in his mind. The class zones out, and he follows suit.

He-- Mako, himself, just him-- walks home in the heat, through a maze of streets only his steps remember.

The sun follows.

The teacher, well-- she’s clearly invested in these musicians. If he were older, but not as old as he is now, he would have put more effort into an enthusiastic conversation. He would step out of his comfort zone, asking this and that, who and where, so on and so forth, eyes carefully keeping contact, lips smiling gently, chuckling and nodding appropriately.

He was a kid, however, watching this strange authority figure one-sidedly display a love or even obsession for this thing just outside his interest, and that made things impossible.

The sun hunts.

The professor, an older lady with a bandana of an indeterminate, shimmering, green or kaleidoscope pattern around her head, shows him some videos he can practice with. Mako leaves her, off to walk home in the heat and travel a green maze with an indeterminate path and branches and plants and black canvas or mesh.

The professor is enthusiastic, and besides giving him the black canvas bag with rips and tears and holes in it, she sells his standing bass just before a funnel of fire strikes his house, tearing it apart with its unrelenting teeth.

I _won’t be around forever,_ the standing bass tells him, empty bookstands covered in stickers and neurons falling all around him. The patchwork corridors of this green flesh lung constrict and he runs, and runs, and runs and runs and runs, running until the tunnels and paths turn circular and canyonlike and black, the record skips a beat, the needle goes flying off and the radio instruments out in the middle of the desert swivel to the center of nowhere with a screech and he almost wakes.

 

Jamison hovers over him, just barely grasping onto his face as he floats away.

His wide, round eyes are _too_ round _, too_ wide, yet too fleeting, and everything passes by him in short flashes of light and matter and time-- Jamison’s eyes, a bed he half falls through, bedsheets bound not by gravity or reason but rather the brief feeling of flight, and everything, everything, _everything_ , _and forever_ , passes by all around him, until there is nothing, seemingly nothing, at all.

Everything could have come crashing down. Jamison could have fallen to earth, the ceiling could have caved in, and his bedcover, with its heavy, fernlike tendrils, could have ensnared him.

They never do. The bedcover never drags him down into a singularity, Jamison never falls down, and in a broken moment or a flash, he just comes by to the gray, gray room with pinholes and keyboards and white walls and unimportant hardwood and nothing, nothing, **nothing** , just nothing at all.

He reaches a hand out, unsteady as it has been lately, into the pause of space before of him.

The light from the window dances on the edges of his palms and knuckles, contouring his strong, good hands.

Speckles and hairs and ridges and scars cover his view, uneasily multiplying and receding.

He places a hand on his face, and it feels heavy, and good, grounding him to earth until it too escapes him and his throat ties up.

He drags and kneads and digs into the flesh of his face like plasticine, desperate for anything at all, for a comma or a period or the last word in an unsatisfying, unfinished sentence.

And like this, he lays in bed, not asleep, definitely awake, arguably alive, but quietly and listlessly desperate for anything, anything, just anything at all, and the most useless fucking part of his brain screams that that’s not a life at all.

 

The gray piano in his gray, gray room waits and waits and waits, like everything else in his life had waited until, unlike the rest of his life, it gets fed up and screeches to life.

The keys audibly slam, the small interface nested within the knobs flashes erratically, the sound delivers an exclamation mark, and Mako comes to notice the fleshy, white mass spanning every corner of his room.

It spirals and bubbles and rocks with skeletal hands slodging out of the muk. Then, in an uncontrollably fast move, _it_ , this thing, this human, reaches out to slam the keyboard again and again and again, breaking up into angry, passionate fractals and prisms and faces and flesh with every beat.

A face, a man, and his endlessly deep eyes knife him down as they angle directly into his soul.

_You’re alive, so get out there._

_For yourself,_

_And for me._

 

The flesh seeps back into the gray, gray walls of his gray, gray room and he gets up, maybe too quick, almost entwined in his bedsheets, in a desperate attempt to hold onto what he rapidly and inexplicably pieces together to be _Jamison, here, with him,_ but he’s gone.

And so he stands in his room, not asleep, definitely awake, and arguably alive, staring.

The world is comes to a stop, but his legs and back ache and his eyes don’t track quite right. His head, an anvil, swims in a pool of its own weight and nausea and blood. The alarm clock on his phone jumps to life, and it sounds like jargon until his ears untwist themselves, attuning to what seems to be some story about the alumni in the desert and their deep space radio burst research.

It doesn’t mean much to him, but it does mean something to the researchers. He hangs onto that, hangs onto strange, invoked lands in space as the voice fades out and the segment on the radio goes over to the world news.

The nausea never escapes him as he swings into the kitchen, though it’s bearable. The carafe is still half full from the morning, so he heads to that first, before even his shower. Jonnie and himself will leave mugs by the sink for drinking water, so he grabs the first one he sees, not minding that it’s glass.

His hands have a gentler tremble now, reliable in a sense, so the cup scatters nervous rainbows and light until the coffee reaches a comfortable distance by the top.

He brings it over to the awkwardly placed couch in the living room that meets the kitchen, taking a look outside to what is half of another apartment complex and half of an unremarkable city view.

He watches the city, teeming in the distance as the sun settles like a feather floating down.

 

As he takes a sip, he sees a bottomless cup, and a dark little museum room floating on the oily surface. Floating, floating, floating, until it clears up and he can see deeper into the room, with its lights dim and low.

They illuminate a series of halls with vases and amorphous paintings and shells and moss and opals, hushed down and quiet. A lone visitor, radiating just the faintest glow like a dying night light or a star, looks up to him.

And it’s ok.

They disappear, and that’s ok too.

 

Mako takes a sip, the uncomfortable rumble and shaking of the city and his hands easing out.

Mako takes a sip, and out of the corner of an eye, a figure mosaics and flickers into flesh, quiet, watching the the city with him.

Mako takes a sip, and the unassuming horizon stays that way.

Mako takes a sip, and the museum room never leaves after all.

Mako takes a sip.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The doctors tell him this could be his last checkup unless any sudden symptoms appear. Things seemed to have plateaued-- his words come slower, but they come to him eventually. His hands shake, maneuvering with less precision, but they are his hands in the end, so on and so forth.

He doesn’t ask them if he’ll ever be able play the standing bass again. That’s not the doctor’s place to say, or even for him to ask. He won’t corral himself down an avenue like a guideless tourist or a cornered hunter.

There will always be an adventurous way to play the guitar, or synthesize strings, to paint by colors, or play by numbers.

He walks back home from the doctor’s office just as they close, holding that close to his heart.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Though, if there’s one thing he’s learned in this whole ordeal, it’s that it doesn’t hurt to get some help.

 _Jamison_ , he calls out.

 _...Mm?_ Jamison replies, with a smile in his voice.

_Remember the time I said that sixth sense for sweepstakes was fucking with me? Changed my mind. Let’s go get ourselves something good._

Jamison cackles like the revv of an engine.

_...Finally!_


End file.
